Dr. Jasmine A. Choudhury
Volume-XIV, Issue-I, October 2025
Volume-XIV, Issue-I, October 2025 | ||
Received: 03.10.2025 | Accepted: 22.10.2025 | |||
Published Online: 31.10.2025 | Page No: 39-51 | |||
DOI: 10.64031/pratidhwanitheecho.vol.14.issue.01W.029 | ||||
Beyond
Boundaries: Posthumanist Perspectives on Human-Nonhuman Entanglements in Select
Works of South Asian Women Writers
Dr. Jasmine A. Choudhury, Assistant Professor,
Department of English, The Assam Royal Global University, Guwahati, Assam,
India | |
This study
explores the intersection of posthumanist thought and human-nonhuman
entanglements in the works of select South Asian women writers. Posthumanism,
as stated by Ihab Hassan, N. Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe, and Donna Haraway, raises
questions about anthropocentric models of existence, which look at animals,
ecosystems, and technologies to theorise human identity, memory, and social
experience. Taking the fiction of Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidhwa, and
Kamila Shamsie as case studies, this paper will contend that these authors
complicate and foreclose binaries between human and nonhuman existence. By recognising
the material and affective lives of animals, topographies, and ecologies, the
writers present a more expansive relational ontology. Their narratives perform
the decentring of the human subject, along the lines of Hayles’ distributed
cognition and Wolfe’s call for increased ethical sensitivity in a world filled
with nonhumans.
The authors place environmental
degradation along with colonial violence, caste oppression, and gendered
suffering and reveal how social and ecological injustice intersect. Haraway’s idea
of “staying with the trouble” gives us a working description of how these texts
speak to problematic histories of extraction and survival. Ultimately, this
paper argues that South Asian women’s literature contributes critically to
global posthumanist theory because theoretical ideas are informed by local histories
of place, power, and survival. | |
Keyword:
|